Have you heard of Alvin Greene? He is the current Democratic challenger to incumbent U.S. Senator Jim DeMint. What’s shocking is that Alvin Greene got 59% of the vote in a primary where he had no signs and no advertisements. He raised very little money. Greene defeated Vic Rawl, a former state lawmaker who was virtually assured to challenge DeMint.

That was, until Monday. Democratic leaders are considering appealing to the state Supreme Court to claim that electronic machines could be to blame. Even the top U.S. Congressman from South Carolina (Democrat Jim Clyburn) is calling on state and federal investigators to learn how he raised the $10,440 to file to run. Clyburn and others claim that someone put up the money to put Greene as a Democrat to embarrass the party. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get into the positives and negatives that come with using such a system, an explanation of our current system is in order. Currently, the United States uses a system called Single Member District Plurality (SMDP). The system is pretty self-explanatory: an election for one member of a legislature or local council is decided by whoever has the most votes, regardless of whether the top finisher gets 50 percent of the vote. The only states where this is not the case is in Louisiana and Washington, where the top two vote getters in all elections proceed to a runoff election if no one gets above 50 percent of the vote (with the passing of Proposition 14, California will also be added to this list). The SMDP system is also used in the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Korea.